Saturday, 1 May 2010

His talks in Christchurch and Wellington drew on, and developed, his 20,000 word essay on why global capitalism is tipping towards collapse, and how we can act for a decent future.

He argues that for the first time in capitalism’s 500-year history, a perfect storm is beginning to engulf the world system.

The main elements are system-level crises of profitability, ecology, resources, imperialism and legitimacy. Their concentration and intensification look set to trigger world system collapse within a historically short time period.

Can we survive the chaos, conflict and carnage of looming collapse? Can Earth’s citizens collectively built a decent future in the face of elite counteractions? Yes, says Grant.

He resurrects Marx’s analysis of social change to explain the growing intersection of system-level crises which will collapse global capitalism as surely as previous civilisations were brought down by their own perfect storms.

“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production,” said Marx. “Then begins an era of social revolution.”

An era of social revolution will be triggered by the perfect storm appearing over capitalism’s horizon as it collapses the economic, ecological and imperial foundations of the world system. The need to unite or die will call forth a Global Uniting of the mass of humanity which ushers in a society of solidarity.

Watch video footage of the Wellington talk below (apologies for the background hum in the audio track)